Refugee Advocacy Scholarship

Aiming to advance protection standards, refugee law specialists have produced a vast body of advocacy scholarship. Literature within the field is framed by a protection narrative that speaks of a human rights approach to refugee law premised on legal duties and moral obligations towards refugees and the economic and cultural benefits that flow from fulfilling them. Having previously enjoyed varying degrees of acceptance by European policy makers and the public, the protection narrative has lost traction in the current EU refugee crisis. This article explores why this has happened by looking at the protection narrative and how refugee law speaks to politics. Discourse in the refugee rights is focused on the 1951 Convention and is commonly situated within an adversarial dialectic vis-à-vis governments. It is also marked by silences regarding core anxieties of the public which include how refugee policy impacts marginalized host communities, immigration and deportation, national identity, and security. Because compliance with international law rests on public as well as state goodwill, human rights narratives that are detached from perceived realities carry risks. The current EU refugee crisis has seen politics speaking back to law, attacking the underlying authority of international and EU law, the human rights experts who interpret it, as well as the legal, social and moral arguments for complying with its obligations. This wider political ecosystem may not be susceptible to change by advocacy scholars, but the new context makes it urgent for the profession to re-craft a more effective and relevant narrative that retains a human rights approach to refugee protection, widening the scope of rights holders to include host communities. The most effective way to achieve this is to distinguish more sharply between scholarship and advocacy, engage less selectively and defensively with the concerns of skeptics, and work more extensively with collaborators in other disciplines.